A Slow Devour
by as much fun as holding a gun
Summary: Molly ventures down into the sewers where the palest of the sewer rats decide to play a game with her. When Gary learns of her past will he decide to kill her or help her better understand the world she lives in? Set after VtmB.
1. Chapter 1

A Slow Devour

A Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines Fanfiction

Disclaimer: I own nothing from this amazing game, but it seems the game owns quite a bit of real estate in my psyche.

* * *

The little girl sat in the far corner of the cell, knees drawn to her chest.

She was looking at her brother with what seemed to be concern, noting perhaps the shallow state of his breathing, or the blood slowly oozing from the stump where his leg used to be, despite the sad attempt at a tourniquet he'd made.

Stanley Gimble watched her through the small window in the door to the cell.

He wasn't quite sure what he was going to do with the girl but her brother was a fine specimen, certainly worth the trouble of dealing with her. She was not extraordinarily pretty, though Gimble rarely liked the way children looked. Little midgets they were, too disproportionate.

She did have good clear skin though and perhaps, he thought, he could use it for patches.

Gimble hummed a merry tune while he washed up for the coming rituals. He would need to finish the job soon or the meat would go bad. It was a chore to keep everything fresh and alive but unable to fight back. Gimble felt he had perfected the art quite nicely over the years.

He laid out his meat cleaver, a scalpel and a small pair of surgical scissors. He carefully wiped each of them with sanitizing solution. It wouldn't do to have the prosthetics collecting gangrene before he even got a chance to cure them. He worked quickly, methodically.

He felt eyes watching him, and glanced up. The girl stood now. She was too short to reach the window, but she hadn't moved from the corner, and she could still see him.

"Are you going to kill him?" she asked. Her voice was small and unsure and he had to momentarily pause in his work to hear her over the sound of running water, the sink.

Gimble decided she deserved an honest answer, though he hoped she would not go into hysterics again.

"Yes, my dear," he answered, and he turned the faucet off, running a bloodied rag over the polished surface of the cleaver with agile fingers. He did not recognize that this action would make the sanitation rituals he preformed on his equipment useless.

The girl's eyes shown with unshed tears, but she said nothing in return.

* * *

Molly was nine. Her last name was Tanner. Her address was 206 Pinewood Avenue. She repeated these things over and over in her young head, a sacred mantra. This is what she would tell the police when they came, she thought, and this thought deeply calmed her.

The man, her captor, their captor, she amended, sparing her older brother a sidelong glance, looked and sounded quite professional most of the time.

He had an accent, one she had come to find quite creepy, quite horrifying. His calm voice had called to her, she clearly remembered, over the drone of the bonesaw and her sobbing.

"Do excuse the mess," he'd said, as though they were dinner guests he had invited to entertain instead of prisoners he held against their will and permanently maimed. As if it was red spaghetti sauce flying at her face instead of blood.

John stirred from the other side of the cell, waking up from the fitful sleep he'd settled into. Molly was at his side in a second, scrambling as quickly as her wobbly legs could muster. It had been several days since they'd been fed anything and she shook when she moved.

He was laying down, the stump of his leg elevated, resting against the concrete wall. She pulled his head into her lap and he cracked a strained smile up at her.

"How are you holding up?" he asked her.

"I'm great," she said, smiling back.

He shook his head at her. His resilient little sister, as stubborn and as full of humor in this dreadful situation as she ever was.

She petted his head and he closed his eyes, letting the feeling of her warm hands on his hair lull him into a state of relaxation. Though the tourniquet he'd tied around his leg had deadened the pain some, the ache was still deep.

"Why don't you go back to sleep," she suggested, "Save your strength for when help comes?"

The content smile vanished from his lips, "Yeah," he said slowly. He opened his eyes, and her hand momentarily stopped it's gentle ministrations.

He didn't believe at that point, that there would be any help coming, but looking at his naive little sister's big brown eyes, he just couldn't say that to her. To see her normally happy-go-lucky expression so distraught deeply disturbed him. He wanted to make her smile again before they died.

"What are you going to eat first? Where do you want me to take you to get something to eat when we're outta here?"

She looked around the cell, thinking, her fingers brushing through his buzz cut again, "I think I want to get something vegetarian."

There, a toothy smile had broken out on her face. He closed his eyes, content, ignoring the throbbing in his leg.

* * *

A while later, Molly could not determine how long, Gimble's footsteps plodded closer to their cell.

His plain, unassuming face appeared in the small window cut into the heavy metal door.

"You're awake?" Gimble glanced at John, whose head was still situated on Molly's lap.

"Good! We can get started then!" Gimble said, the enthusiasm in his voice nearly maniacal.

Molly watched her brother's adam's apple bob as he swallowed, and she couldn't contain the whimper of fear from escaping her lips.

Gimble unlocked the cell door and strode in. He heaved John off of Molly's lap and dragged him away, out of the room, ignoring both the fatigued struggling of the young man and the desperate protests of the girl. The cell door slammed again behind him. He didn't bother to lock it.

Molly sat back down in the far corner of the cell, the only corner that wasn't coated in her brother's blood, and waited.

Her breath hitched in her throat as she heard the shrieking wail of the saw again; her brother's hoarse begging. She listened to it until it became a continuous drone on and on in her head.

On and on until her brother fell silent.

Gimble came for her next, opening the cell door wide. She heard his footsteps before he got there and stood, ready. When he motioned for her in the doorway, she numbly followed him without protest.

Her tennis shoes were sticky with dried blood and they smacked against the concrete floor.

Gimble led her to a room with many instruments hanging from the walls. Knives glinted at her, of all kinds and sizes.

There was a metal operating table in the center and atop of it lay John. She ran to the dismantled torso and kissed his rough cheek, but he didn't respond. His eyes were closed and his skin was rapidly cooling. He was dead.

Gimble allowed her a few moments to mourn. He busied himself with resetting the instruments he'd used on the boy while she cried. Thankfully she didn't take long with it. "Goodbye John," he heard her whisper to the corpse.

She turned to him and regarded him.

He said nothing, and she flinched when he picked her up, placing her atop the table, her short legs dangling over the side. She did not resist, all too consumed in her grief, he suspected.

He took her small forearm in his hand, prodding at the delicate skin there. It was certainly the right color, nearly matching that of her brothers, and it was quite soft. He took the scalpel from the tray where he'd placed it, and he heard her draw in breath.

He glanced at her young face. Her eyes were closed tightly and she was holding her breath. He could not fathom why she would not want to see this.

He took a moment to marvel at the way the silver scalpel shown against her alabaster skin, and then in one swift motion, he sliced a thin line from her wrist to the crease of her elbow. He watched the rich blood ooze down the sides of her arm, where he planned to peel it away from the muscle. She was shaking now, silently crying again, and her tears fell down into the blood, into her cut.

Gimble took a blunt instrument now, and wedged it underneath the sliced skin. This earned him a gasp and she desperately tried to pull away from his grip, digging her fingernails into his arm. He pulled the instrument away from her with a sigh.

He needed to lift the skin from the muscle beneath it without damaging it or ripping it. Perhaps he should just kill her, he thought, but the skin was always better, always more malleable when it was fresh. He stood there in indecision for a moment, thinking about his options.

A shrill buzz interrupted him. It was from the intercom upstairs.

Damn, Gimble thought, as he let the instrument drop back into its tray with a familiar clink. He left the girl there on the table, locking the door to this room behind him.

Molly looked at the cut in her arm and struggled to keep from sobbing again. It hurt bad, and though she didn't want to touch or move it, she remembered her brother using his shirt to stop his bleeding.

She reached over and grabbed the scalpel on the tray beside her with shaking hands. Awkwardly, one handed, she managed to slash a strip of cloth from her shirt, and used it to blot at the cut. It was deep, and the cloth was almost immediately soaked through in deep red. She pressed it down with a wince, and looked away from it, careful not to allow her eyes to stray to her brother's body beside her either.

Instead she just looked forward at the concrete wall, clearing her mind, preparing herself to die, to go to heaven where John was.

A sudden noise outside the cell caught her attention. She was high enough on the table that she could just barely see through the small barred window in the door.

Flashes of a knife, Gimble's voice and the voice of someone else. Her heartbeat sped in her chest as she listened to the unfamiliar grunts of men engaged in battle. The police? It went on for several minutes, and Molly could not see much. She could not tell who was fighting outside her cell.

The noises didn't last long and then they stopped with an abrupt thud. Someone walked around outside the cell she was in. Her breath hitched as she listened. It wasn't Gimble's methodical, even footsteps she heard.

The door clicked as it was unlocked and _something_ stepped into the room. It was certainly not the police, and in fact, did not appear to even be human.

It had no shirt on, and the skin on its chest, arms, face was grooved and mottled and grey. It was completely hairless, she could clearly see. Its face was wrong, somehow, the features crushed and distorted. Its ears were pointed, like she imagined a faerie's would be, but this inhuman thing was no mystical childhood storybook creature either. It seemed very clearly to her to be some kind of monster.

The monster regarded Molly for a moment with eyes blacker than coal, and then it growled, in a voice that matched its appearance, "Are you okay?"

Its gaze fell to her hand, clutching the shreds of her shirt to her bleeding cut.

It was such a funny thing for a monster to say that Molly nearly began laughing.

"I'm great," she replied, a wry smile on her face.

The monster smiled back at her, like her brother would have. At least, she thought it was a smile, but it had sharp jagged teeth and the expression on its disfigured face was difficult to discern.

"Are you going to eat me?" She asked it, eyeing the teeth speculatively.

The monster laughed at her just once, a shallow hiss.

"No," it said, "I will free you, but you can't say anything about me to anyone, understand?"

Molly looked at it and nodded. She was relieved. This wasn't a monster after all. Gimble, dressed in his professional slacks, with his fanciful accent, he was a monster. This creature, she squinted at it, this ugly thing, was going to help her go home. It clearly wasn't a person, but it was no monster.

She didn't pull away or struggle when its long rasping fingers gently gripped her under her arms and placed her onto the floor. She followed it out of the room, sparing her brother's body one last look before leaving it there. Seeing the torso laid out on the glinting metal of the gurney, and his slack jaw, the pained expression made her heart ache. She vowed to go back to it, to give her brother a proper funeral like the one her grandmother had been given the past spring.

Gimble was splayed across the floor outside the cell, a knife deep in his chest, the whites of his eyes showing under a half-lidded expression. She passed his body without remorse.

She was led out of the maze of stairs and rooms, and outside, in the parking lot shrouded by night.

"Go to the police officer patrolling the museum over there," the thing rasped to her. She glanced at the man across the street and nodded.

As she walked forward towards the policeman, she glanced behind her to thank the oddly compassionate ugly creature who had helped her, but the thing was gone.

* * *

Sixteen year old Molly Tanner sat in her psychiatrist's office, repeating the same old mantra she'd been repeating to people for years. First to the police, when she'd led them to her brother's body, then to her parents, and then to the other psychiatrists they'd had her see back then.

"I don't remember," she told this one, like all the others.

He was a man in his forties. Overweight. Balding at the top, greying at the bottom. He peered over his glasses at her, the creases in his frown deepening. He sat across from her in the lush downtown office. Her in a chair, him hiding behind a desk.

"You don't remember?" he restated over steepled hands, "Nothing after Stanley Gimble cut your arm?"

She shook her head, the motion pulling her hair taunt. It hung like a dark shroud, nearly to the small of her back when free but today she had styled it in a tight braid.

Of course she_ did_ remember. Her thumb briefly swept across the perfectly straight white scar that went all the way from her wrist to the crease of her elbow.

"It's been many years since this has happened, Molly," the therapist said, his voice irritatingly smooth and professional, "It's just you and I here now and I'm sworn to secrecy. Can you still not share? For your own mental health?"

"I really don't remember," Molly lied to him forcefully. She dug her fingers into the cushion of the plush chair she sat in, agitated the man seemed unable to move on.

"Hmm," the psychiatrist said, and he collapsed his hand steeple. He wrote something down in his notes.

Molly knew what they thought, all of them. They thought she had done it somehow, that she had killed Gimble and gotten away. She was content to let them think that, to not substantiate any claims either way.

"Your parents tell me you've stopped taking your medication, Molly. The Adderall I gave you for your ADHD symptoms."

Molly shrugged, unsurprised that her parents knew she'd been flushing the pills. They were nosy.

"It makes me feel anxious," she said. Another lie. Funny how they seemed to be a default setting for her these days.

The doctor nodded and reached into his desk drawer. He pulled out a prescription pad and began writing, "We'll try something else then," he said.

She rolled her eyes when he wasn't looking. Somehow, she thought, he probably knew she was going to flush these too, so why even bother? Pills, Molly spat in her innermost thoughts. Even pills wouldn't end the dreams of the strange creature that had come to her aid in Gimble's Prosthetics. Pills wouldn't make her normal again. They couldn't bring back John.

For some reason this man with his shiny desk to hide behind and his little scribbles and his books held upright by bronze animal heads thought he knew something about her. He could connect the dots that weren't there, accuse her of things she didn't do, but he had no evidence.

Even if she told him what had really happened_,_ _for her own mental health_, what a crock of crap that was, it wasn't as if he'd believe her. He'd slap her with another little label. Schizophrenia, most likely. More useless pills, maybe even institutionalization. She wasn't stupid enough to want that.

Molly rather hoped she was mentally ill, though she'd never seen the monster from her childhood again after that night. She secretly hoped that perhaps it would show up in more than just her dreams. Maybe, she thought with a scathing, bitter sarcasm, it could kill this irritating man for her, or at least guide her hand.

Her eyes trailed along the bookshelf, where several of her psychiatrist's own books were showcased on the shelves. She had an inkling that he intended to bleed her of her own little story to add to his collections. Cracking the Killer Child, maybe. She should suggest that as a future title to him.

Next time, maybe, if he pissed her off enough.

Molly took the paper with her new prescription on it from him with a tight, closed-lipped smile, more of a grimace, and left the office.

* * *

Author's Note:

For those of you who are reading I Dream of Blood, don't worry! This story will not (hopefully) effect the output of that one. For those of you who are wondering, though Molly is present in my other fanfiction, this story does not coincide with the timeline of events in my other fanfiction, so enjoy it separately. Don't try to like, figure out how it fits in there cause it doesn't.

That's all folks. More to come.


	2. Chapter 2

Molly passed the glowing signs of porn shops, the impossibly tall skyscrapers, the bars, the clubs. She dodged the hoards of businessmen going home for the day, the traffic in the smoggy downtown air nearly back to back. She was lost in the sounds of rush hour.

She stuffed the little piece of paper with her perscription on it in the back pocket of her jeans. Perhaps her mother would find it before she did the laundry, and if not, oh well. It would seem an honest and legitimate excuse and it would gain her a few, precious days without her mother's nagging.

There was something wrong with her. It was not as if Molly doubted that fact.

It was not simply the presence of the hideous creature. No, she had promised the damned thing that she would tell no one, and she had every intention of keeping the promise. It didn't bother her, though she knew it should, that the thing was out there somewhere, if it were indeed real at all.

She dodged more people in suits as they shadowed the sides of buildings. Rain began to dot the sidewalks in heavy drops, and wind blew past Molly. She clutched her bare arms. A tee shirt was not a good choice for a January night.

It was also no fault of her parents. There was certainly nothing wrong with them, a white, middle class, startlingly normal couple. They were just the right kind of couple. The kind that got ratings, the kind that shocked news stations when their oldest son ended up in the clutches of a serial killer. Teary eyed and tragic, the cameras had eaten it up.

She scowled at the deteriorating brick side of a building as she slowly meandered past it.

Still, her parents had not understood. Molly didn't go to the funeral. She didn't want any of the town's curiosity, thinly veiled as pity. She didn't want to see what they'd done to hide the mangled state of John's body to make it acceptable for viewing.

Molly began to feel sick as she thought about it, and she made a conscious effort to think of something else.

She had walked across town, near the homeless camp on the other end of the city. The sun was setting low in the sky, casting an orange light over the buildings. She needed to get home before her parents had a shitfit.

Yes, there was something wrong with her now, Molly knew. It wasn't something that she could put her finger on, but it was there, always lurking under the surface.

It sat in her brain, crawled under her skin, sunk down into her bones. She could not shake it off, explain or place it.

Gimble was dead, but so were all the people he had killed. Her brother was dead. His silence hung heavy in the air around her. Molly found that although she was the only surviving victim, she herself was quite dead as well, as if Gimble had taken a part of her with him when he went. It was funny, Molly mused, that a man so obsessed with taking_ parts_ could do something like that from the dead.

Molly ducked into an alleyway, waiting for the rain to settle a bit. She got out the crumpled prescription from her pocket, and squinted at the unfamiliar name of the drug. She could hardly make out the psychiatrist's handwriting. She wondered what this one would do to her, and if she would get desperate enough to actually take it.

A gust of wind ripped the paper from her fingers. Molly watched it flutter across the road, like a white, clumsy butterfly, and disappear into an open manhole in front of her.

"Fuck," Molly said, jolting forward after it.

She peered down into the hole, a bottomless pit of dirty, cracked concrete. She could see the little paper, sticking to the bottom. It was right there. It was too late to go back to the psychiatrist's office. She was always the last patient of the day and the place closed at 6. If she didn't get the prescription, her parents would kill her.

Molly made a decision that would change the course of the rest of her life. She lowered herself into the hole, the bottoms of her sneakers touching the top rung of the service ladder, riddled with rust, and slick from the inpouring rain.

Molly's sneakers were old, the bottoms worn thin.. She felt the pit of her stomach flit to her throat as she lost her balance, slipping off the ladder. A hard, solid blow to the back of the head. She heard her skull bang against the metal, loud as a fire cracker, and then darkness consumed her vision.

* * *

Billy Horwell had been on the job for less than an hour when the shit started going down where he was in the sewers, a pun he quite intended.

He was green, plain and simple, and though he'd thumbed through the book of protocol his manager had given him, he was certain it hadn't mentioned anything about power outages.

Billy played with the headlamp on his hard hat with nervous, twitching fingers until it flicked on. A thin stream of light made its way across the damp sewer air to land squarely on a dead rat's opaque, red eyes.

He sighed a breath of relief, louder than he'd intended it to be.

Why had he agreed to this? It was a last minute job, and he'd had every opportunity to opt out of it. His new boss, from all outward appearances, a normally red faced, angry man, had empathetically said he could send someone else. Someone that was not a first-timer.

Billy should have known something was off about the job right there, but he had thought only of the opportunity to make a good first impression. He hadn't thought he would be in this situation, scared nearly shitless in the dark. Again with the bodily function jokes. He sighed. What was he coming to?

The light bounced around as he walked, encircled by the overwhelming darkness that only came from being deep underground. If Billy Horwell had been more of a claustrophobic man, he might have left the sewers then and there. As it was, Billy had never been the type to run from a difficult situation, and so he pressed forward, plunging his knee-high boots into the putrid water.

He paused in mid step. The radio at his belt buzzed with static and his boss' disjointed and broken words.

He brought the radio to his lips, "Repeat that?"

"Dammit, not you, Horwell. I was trying to get Dan. You seen him?"

"Oh, uh..." Billy whipped his head around, as if he expected Dan to suddenly appear behind him. The spot of light wavered over the sewer's rounded concrete slabs.

"No," Billy said, "I can't see a whole lot of anything."

His boss sighed through the static, "We're working on the lights. Looks like the lines been damaged somewhere. Fucking rats."

Billy silently concurred.

"Listen, Horwell," his boss' voice came again, "you get to that broken control valve yet?"

Billy hurriedly pulled out a crumpled map and squinted at the little circle his boss had made for him earlier in the night.

"Uh," Billy said into the walkie, "No, not yet."

In truth, Billy wasn't entirely sure where he was, better yet how to get to where ever he was supposed to be going. The darkness made it nearly impossible to tell, and Billy had never been down in these sewers before. Better not to let his boss know that, though.

"Well you get down there and if you see Dan, you tell him to fucking contact me or he's going to be looking for another job in the morning."

Billy swallowed.

"Yessir," he said, and he continued trudging in what he supposed was probably not the right direction, but was a good direction nonetheless.

* * *

Water, loud, rushing around her.

With the hazy feeling that she was drowning, Molly grounded her palms onto the jagged concrete seams of the sewers, and sat up.

It was pitch black. Molly looked in the direction she assumed was probably up, to find that the sewer plate somehow was now closed. She could see only pinholes of light drifting down on her. Dim light, as she could not even make out the rungs of the ladder, better yet try to climb onto it and lift the heavy metal plate over her head.

Molly's brain could hardly keep up with the situation. She sat at the bottom of the manhole for several long moments, trying to figure out how the sewer plate was now closed.

She was waterlogged, nearly every pore of her soaked through with rain and sewer water. An outbreak of shivers wracked her body like a seizure in intensity. The back of her head hurt and if she could see, she would find herself dizzy. As it was, Molly could not see but a few feet in front of her.

Molly's hands gripped blindly around her in the blackness, feeling for something familiar. Hesitant, Molly imagined herself gripping something she didn't want to grip; something nasty, slimy, but she could feel nothing like that. Just metal, cold, wet, rusted, but not slimy.

For a moment, Molly found herself terrified, and she wanted to cry. The stupid piece of paper with the prescription was long gone and that was the entire reason she had come down here. Now it was dark and she was stuck. She sucked in a harsh breath to clear her head, and the moment passed.

Her hands followed the rough jagged concrete edges of her surroundings. There was a person-sized hole in front of her. Molly had no idea where it would lead, but maybe, she thought, she could find some other way out.

Still, she hesitated. What if she got lost? No one would think to look for her down here. But she couldn't just sit in this manhole either, and she knew she would never be able to climb the ladder to get to the streets.

So, without much other choice, Molly crawled through the pipe leading towards the loud rush of water.

Molly dangled a leg from the hole into the foyer of the sewers, and then the other.

She lowered herself all the way to the ground below, carefully, and hissed as the water soaked into her shoes. It was ice against the skin of her calves.

She wasn't exactly sure what to do then, and so she stood in the darkness, trembling, listening to the river of water draining away at her feet.

Molly heard a noise, a sloshing, a faint echo of footsteps. She turned around and back again, looking for any sign of life. She could not tell where it was coming from, and though she could see a bit further than in the dark manhole entrance, it was not much better. It was just a black pit in the distance surrounded by concrete walls.

She squinted.

There, a disembodied light bounced around in the far reaches of her vision, momentarily blinding her.

"Hey," she croaked, and the sloshing paused.

* * *

By the time that Billy Horwell's and Molly Tanner's paths had met in the endless underground maze of the sewers under Los Angeles, Billy had been wading around for nearly two hours. Though he would not admit it to anyone, he felt quite relieved to see another human being in the inhuman dark, even if that human being was just as lost as him.

For a moment, Billy had thought it was Dan. The girl's voice had been so gravelly, so hoarse that he had almost thought it possible to be Dan's.

As Billy's headlamp fell upon Molly's childish features, her cheeks lightly littered with freckles, her dark eyes, he thought she looked almost dead. Though it could just be the harsh glint of the LED, her skin seemed nearly white in color. Her lips were no quite blue, but damned close.

She squinted into the bright light of the headlamp, and he quickly readjusted his head so that the light fell down to the water swirling at their feet instead.

"Are you okay?"

She didn't look okay and he supposed it was kind of a dumb question to ask. She was shivering violently and he could clearly see blood soaked through the shoulder of her thin cotton shirt. She obviously needed help of some kind. She was young, and looked to Billy to be on the verge of tears, and he could not resist the parental urge he felt to get her to safety.

The girl shook her head, "I fell," she said, dark eyes drawing his to the entrance of the pipe beside her, "I was trying to get something that fell down here, and I slipped, and..." her voice died in her throat as she touched the back of her head with proding fingers, parting the dark hair at the nape of her neck, messily pulled back into a braid.

She brought her fingers to her face, squinting at the bright red sheen that collected there.

She seemed to not know that she was injured, and by the looks of her clothing, completely soaked through with water, Billy surmised that she had been down there a while.

This night was just getting better and better, he thought. First the lights, now this? Had that damned manual said anything about people falling into manholes, Billy promised himself that he would do something rather too inappropriate to say aloud with it as soon as he got back. He was certain that it would not have prepared him for this. The spotlight on his head danced between them as he shook his head..

"Okay," Billy said, trying to sound half as confident as he felt. He was the one wearing the hard hat, after all.

He pulled out the walkie talkie at his utility belt.

"Boss," he said into it, pressing down on the ridged button at its side, "I found a..." he glanced at her again, "teenage girl down here. She's hurt. Says she, um... fell into the sewers."

The walkie buzzed with static, and the voice of his boss was absent in it.

"Hello? Boss?"

Still nothing.

"Damn it," Billy felt the sudden urge to take out his frustration on the walkie talkie, and throw the piece of shit into the sewer water. He clenched his hand over it until he heard the plastic groan under his fingers.

"There's an emergency phone this way," Billy said to the girl, being sure to keep the uncertainty out of his voice. He paused, regarding her again.

"Are you hurt... I mean, can you walk?"

She nodded.

Billy wasn't sure whether she would say anything else at all to him, and so he turned away from her, fumbling again with the map.

He was not at all certain that he could get her back to the emergency phone he knew was perched on the side of the rounded sewer walls. He had passed it somewhere on his way there. He was not even certain that it would work with the lack of power they were now experiencing.

But maybe, if Billy could somehow find a way to get this girl to safety, he could save the fuckup of a job he had done. Two hours into it, and he still wasn't anywhere near the broken valve. He sighed, hoping this would make up for it, and maybe save his job in the process.

* * *

Molly watched the sewer worker pull out his map for the third time in the past 10 yards, and couldn't help but think that they were lost.

He was a bit overweight, probably mid-forties, and looked to be Latino, though he had no accent.

She was happy at least for the light he had, and she followed close behind him, trying not to look around too much. When she looked around, Molly noticed things that unnerved her. If she listened too carefully, she could almost imagine the far off sloshing of footsteps. If she looked too hard into the darkness, she could almost see faces.

So Molly tried to keep her eyes on the back of the sewer workers vest, and she hummed a broken, unhappy melody to stop her from hearing anything. Her voice sounded much better than it usually did to her own ears as the sewers coaxed it into an echo.

The sewer worker stopped again, abruptly, and Molly nearly slammed into him.

"Damn it, gotta be around here somewhere," he muttered under his breath.

They had been going straight for an awful long time, Molly was certain, and they had seen no emergency phones.

The light perched atop the sewer workers head suddenly faltered, and then went out. It was darker than she had ever experienced. No stars, no lights in the distance. Total, suffocating darkness.

Molly withheld a whimper. She stumbled forwards in fear, trying to touch the sewer worker, to be sure that he was still there.

She grabbed something but it was not the sewer worker, of that much she was certain.

It was freezing and round, like a pipe or something, but that couldn't be it because the texture of it was wrong. It felt a little like crumpled, ripped paper but stronger. It almost felt like someone's scarred, stitched up skin, if they were dead. Like John's skin, sitting in a coffin. She whimpered again, pulled her fingers away from it.

The sewer worker's light flickered back on, and he muttered, hitting it repeatedly against the palm of his hand. "Fucking shit," he said, "Are you alright?"

Molly nodded, breathing shallow and fast.

"Heard some movin around, thought you fell or something."

"No," she said.

"Well," he looked at her again, carefully, brows drawn together. He was concerned about her, Molly's mind surmised for her. She was certain that the expression on her face was just short of terror.

"We'd better just try to get out of here," he said, "before the light goes out again. We'll call you an ambulance from a payphone or somethin."

She nodded, remembering the blood on her scalp. Maybe it was a good idea to go to the hospital. She had fallen pretty hard, after all.

"Let's just try to get out of one of the manholes, huh?" he said.

She nodded again. He offered her a small smile and glanced around, looking for the nearest manhole to the surface.

It was only a few yards ahead, and they hurried to it. The sewer worker disappeared into the pipe, leaving her again in relative darkness. She had just the glow of the headlamp, deep inside the manhole shining through. Molly waited, watching the pockets of his scuffed up jeans as he crawled forward on his hands and knees.

"_You're a pretty little thing, aren't you?"_

Molly glanced around in the darkness. Where had that voice come from? It close to her ear and low, and it was a male voice, gravelly and terrible. She circled around, straining her vision to the farthest reaches it could go.

"_Are you afraid?"_

"Yes," she choked out, feeling close to sobbing. She could see, even in the low light, that there was no one there. It was just her. She was talking to herself, hearing voices. Maybe her psychiatrist had been right all along. Maybe she was schizophrenic. Maybe she _had_ killed Gimble and blamed it on some unreal vision.

"Are you real?" she whispered to the disembodied voice.

But the voice was gone, the presence she felt gone, and the sewer worker was crawling back out of the manhole.

"Fucking sewer plate is melted shut," he said, "Can you believe that? Like somebody took a fucking blow torch to it and welded it up."

Molly looked at him forlornly.

The sewer worker looked pretty angry. At God, she suspected, or all the cosmic forces he believed were at work making these coincidences, this seemingly unending bad fortune they were having.

Molly didn't believe in coincidences.

They trotted on and she didn't find herself all too surprised when the next sewer plate was compromised, and the next, and the one after that. Eventually, the sewer worker stopped checking them.

* * *

Author's note: Sorry for the wait. Real life got in the way of my imaginary one. I hate when that happens.


	3. Chapter 3

Billy Horwell was not easily deterred. He dutifully went to check each of the manholes, coming up with the same conclusion each time.

Some of them were welded shut. Others had something too heavy on them to lift. He heard the roar of an engine right outside of one as though a truck was parked there. He suspected one of its tires was right over the plate.

Billy would not have described himself as an easily scared individual. Still, as he looked between the girl close at his heels and manhole after sabotaged manhole, he couldn't help feeling like something was awfully wrong with this situation.

As he led her around from sewer plate to sewer plate, he watched her expression become more and more desperate. He tried to come up with some sort of explanation for it. To comfort her, he clarified in his own mind.

He couldn't come up with anything, not even a suitable lie that a teenager would buy, and it bothered him.

Billy had spent his entire life fixing things. First cars, and then plumbing, and now he was going to spend his days knee deep in shit, maintaining sewer equipment. He was an orderly man, the kind of man that needed an explanation.

As he walked with the girl, he went over the situation in his mind. He felt the metal above his head, still hot to the touch. Why would anyone be parked in an alleyway? What would be the point of welding the seams of the sewer plates together? What reasonable explanation was there?

Billy's sloshed footsteps momentarily faltered, but he said nothing, as he realized that there was none. Someone was trying to keep them down there.

By the time he had accepted that, he had also begun to accept the fact that they had walked so far away from the area they had started in, the map he was using was no longer correct. He tucked it away, into the back pocket of his jeans. They were coming up on four hours in the lonely, freezing sewers underneath the city, and Billy also began to accept that his headlamp would soon go out.

He mentally prepared himself for this inevitable fact and for the first time in a very long time, perhaps since Billy was a very young child, he was terrified.

* * *

Gary was not a patient man, certainly not in life, when he had been waited on hand and foot by the ridiculous, brownnoseing movie companies. Lavish prizes, consolation prizes now, for his participation in films; They had taken him out to dinner, gifted him fine wine and chocolates, like he was some beautiful woman they were trying to get into the pants of. Gary had never _waited_ for anything in his life.

No, patience was a learned trait, and patience was not Gary's strongest point. Not even now, when all he had left was time, an endless torrent of days filled with grotesque choices such as the one he was now engaged in. Gary scoffed, finding a dark humor in the entire horrible irony of it.

The small room in the twisting cavern of the nosferatu's hideaway was filled with electronics of all sorts, wires, television screens and computer monitors all piled atop one another. He rarely came into this room anymore since Mitnick had taken it over.

His cat-yellow eyes followed the small group of humans on the monitors. The picture was grainy and briefly went black every few moments, from shoddy wiring or else the power surges.

Sewer workers almost never went this far down. They usually had no need to, and Gary mused to himself, they would need to be dealt with before they got much further. He didn't particularly enjoy killing the innocents that meandered through their little portion of the sewers, when they indeed did, maybe only once a decade. He turned away from the monitors.

Oblong faces, pointed ears, wide, curious yellow eyes stared back at him. The mob of nosferatu that had gathered behind him to see the action took one look at his brooding expression, and one by one vanished into the humid sewer air around them.

'Cowards,' he thought, a cackle threatening to rise from his throat.

Only one remained of the group. This one was no more brave than the rest, as evidenced by his halting, unsure stance, and hunched shoulders. But this particular nosferatu had business with him, and Gary eagerly put aside his irritation.

Bernard was new blood, and still relatively dumb. His latest workhorse was a chubby nosferatu, if Gary had ever seen one. He was a bit of a pushover, not the scariest looking, but he was loyal. Gary had sired him to take the edge off some of the others who complained far too much for their own good.

"Errand boy," Gary greeted him ruefully, "Are the humans looking for a lost city of Gold down here?"

"From what I could overhear, they're lost." the nosferatu reported, "I, uh, accidentally bumped into the girl."

Gary allowed a wicked smile to grace his features, "Bernard," he said, in his most chastising voice, and then in a darker tone, "Your clumsiness will get you into trouble some day."

Bernard's eyes widened between his grey, crater-filled cheeks. He grimaced at Gary's expression, readjusted his stance.

"Did she see you?" Gary hissed, the uncomforting smile unwavering.

Bernard quickly shook his head, hoping to redeem himself, "A lucky break. Their headlight went out."

"But..." Bernard said, tone regretful.

"But?" Gary mocked impatiently.

"The girl. There was something ...off about her. I dunno for sure but I think she knows about us. I could see it in her face when I was messin with her."

Gary smirked wider, allowing his jagged teeth to show. An interesting twist of events. "You're sure she didn't see _you?_"

The nosferatu nodded again, wide eyed and nervous.

Gary couldn't allow the two humans to leave the sewers with this knowledge, if indeed there was any at all between the idiots. Lost in the sewers, one of them a maintenance man. Gary scoffed. He doubted the worker had much between his ears to be in this situation.

But the girl...It would be nice to know who had revealed themselves to the girl, if it had been at the gnarled hands of someone of his own little herd.

The humans would not come away unscathed then. Gary stifled the small, gnawing feeling of regret at having to kill them. An irritation, but not one that he couldn't have some fun with.

"Come back when you have something more interesting to tell me. Coax it out of her. And while you're out, consider picking up a spine from one of them," Gary cackled.

Bernard nodded, ignoring Gary's jest, and disappeared.

Gary turned again to the monitors, eyes narrowed on the human girl. He was perplexed, and to draw that emotion from a man that prided himself on knowing everything, now that was not an easy feat.

* * *

Molly had noticed it first, perhaps because she found herself unable to look away from the circle of light from the sewer worker's headlamp.

The circle of light trembled with every footstep, as the worker looked around. Sometimes pausing at the concrete walls, other times staying straight ahead into the suffocating darkness. Mostly the light was trained down at the water a few feet in front of them as they walked.

The worker seemed to be deep in thought when she abruptly stopped walking. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that the shoshing footsteps behind him had suddenly gone silent.

He turned to look at her.

Molly stood rigid, stared down at the water making its way over her sneakers. The light ebbed down too, as the sewer worker followed her gaze.

When the light hit the water, Molly knew what she had seen had not been a trick of her mind.

Blood, dancing amidst the flowing sewer water. A lot of it, more than Molly had ever seen before. Enough to color it red in puffs, in tendrils, flowing across her sneakers in a steady stream.

She heard the sharp intake of breath from the sewer worker as he looked at it. The light left Molly's shoes, as the worker panicked. The little circle of light jostled around the river of water around them, trying to find the source of the blood.

Molly swallowed, the saliva thick in her throat. Someone was dead.


	4. Chapter 4

He was dead.

Molly found that the body did not affect her quite the same way she thought it would. The man hanging from the pipe above her looked nothing like John's lifeless, still form. She felt sick, but not as sick as she had expected. She felt afraid, but not as afraid as she should have been considering the circumstances.

"It's Dan," the sewer worker supplied beside her, "God damn it."

His voice was just shy of hysterical. He seemed to be on the verge of crying. A normal reaction to seeing his dead coworker. She heard his sloshing footsteps as he walked away from the scene.

Molly stared at it for a long time, the body of Dan, and said nothing as his blood seeped from his torso, dripped down his clothing, staining her shoes and the water around them. Dan had been a big guy, a bulky guy, and he had been carved into with a knife, it looked like. He had a lot of blood to drain. His skin hung in thin pieces around his ribs. He was hanging by a noose, face twisted into a horrified expression.

Molly thought about her therapist's theories of her insanity; that she'd just somehow conjured up a hallucination in order to help her adolescent mind deal with killing. Molly had thought maybe, just maybe, it could be possible that he was right.

She still didn't know, but she did know one thing, as her eyes swept over the hanging body. There was no way she could have killed Dan. She couldn't have heaved him up that far to tie him to the pipe. She wasn't strong enough. She couldn't have stabbed him in the stomach. She had no knife. Even if she'd been delusional, even if she'd killed before, she couldn't have killed this man. It was a physical impossibility. That simple fact relieved her.

Molly reached up as far as she could, plucked the shiny yellow hardhat from Dan's head, and placed it atop hers. It was too big, but it would suffice. She clicked on the light at the top and smiled.

When she turned to test it out, the stream of light caught the sewer worker's face. His tears shone in the darkness and he stared at her smile as though she had somehow violated his trust.

"Sorry," Molly said, quiet and apologetic, and she let the corners of her mouth fall, "Just glad for the light is all."

The worker nodded, "Didn't know him well or nothin. Just..." he wiped at his eyes, "Damn it."

They stood in silence for a few lengthy moments while he composed himself. The only sound was the dripping, the slow trickle of blood from the hanging body beside her.

* * *

Billy swept his hand over the wall of the sewer, feeling the pock marked stone beneath his skin, sweeping his flickering headlamp down the wall. Dark blocks of stone surrounded them from every side. After the panic had subsided, it was all Billy could do to not feel trapped in what had quickly become their dungeon.

He wasn't sure why he was feeling the sewer's walls. There would be no trap doors, no secret passageways out. But the girl had sat down on a small section of concrete out of the water and was massaging her calves. She needed a break and so he chose to occupy his time thinking.

Billy let his hand fall away from the rough stone, and just as he did, the walkie talkie buzzed to life on his hip, filling the noiseless void that surrounded them. He saw the girl jump out of the corner of his eye. His own heartbeat sped in his ears.

It was through a heavy fog of static that he heard his boss' voice again.

Billy's fingers scrambled for the belt at his hip where his walkie hung. He punched the button, "Hello?" His voice shook, desperation hung thick in the air.

"Horwell?" Billy's boss replied, followed by static.

"Yes," Billy closed his eyes briefly, a sigh of relief making its way out of him, "Yes, thank God." He punched the button down so hard it hurt his fingers.

"Horwell, where are you? ...Nearly three in the morning. You and that good for nothing idiot Dan better be done."

Billy's mouth flatlined and he shook his head. "Dan's dead," he said, "Fucking hanging from a pipe down here, cut up something good."

There was a brief, weighty silence.

"Did you... Did you say _dead?"_

The voice of Billy's boss had lost all of it's usual bravado. He imagined his boss' face, shocked, mouth open wide, ruddy face draining white.

"Consider this my resignation notice, okay? I'm not comin back down here. There's something... something _wrong_ down here," Billy felt his voice crack and pressed his eyes shut tightly against the tears, grimacing. He didn't want to cry in front of the girl again.

His boss' voice lingered in silence over the radio before he heard him clear his throat, "You're freaked out, Billy. That's alright. Just tell me where you are."

Billy recoiled a bit at his name. His boss had never addressed him by his first name, and Billy was surprised that he even remembered it.

"I don't even fucking know," Billy admitted.

"Okay, okay," his boss said over some static, "Take a couple breaths. Dan wasn't in the right state of mind, you know? He'd been suicidal in the past."

Billy glanced at the hanging body to his right, shrouded in darkness. Dan's open eyes shone in the headlamp. He shook his head, "No, no... Dan didn't kill himself. There's no way, no fucking way he did that to himself."

A gurgling noise deep in his boss' throat sent shivers down Billy's spine. It was a deep gurgling accompanied by a wet cough. It was the gurgling of someone that was slowly drowning.

"Boss?" Billy said tentatively, his stomach twisting into a nauseating ball.

Wet wheezing, like forcing liquid through lungs, more static.

"No, no, no... God, damn it."

Billy quietly sobbed, lowering the walkie talkie down to rest in his hand. He knew what had happened, how could he not? His boss was spluttering on his own blood on the floor of his office. The tears were hot down his face. They stuck to the stubble on his chin before dropping down into the blood-streaked water below him.

"Hello," another voice said from the walkie talkie, one that Billy did not recognize. It was dark, gravelly, monstrous, and the static did not help the sound.

Billy's head shot up in surprise. He looked at the girl, whose eyes were wide. She was terrified so Billy tried to pull his shit together.

"Who the fuck is this?" he said into the walkie. His fingers trembled.

The voice laughed, a slow cackle as though they were trying to sound like a haunted house special effect.

"Never mind that," it said, "I want to speak to your female companion."

Billy looked again at the girl, face pinched in worry. She was staring at the ground now, looking sick, looking pale.

"Well you're speaking to me," he said, "so maybe you should start explaining what the hell is going on around here."

"Hmm..." the voice drawled, "What_ is _going on? Well, I'd say an awful lot of people are dying around you, Billy Horwell. Are you afraid that you might be next?"

Billy licked his lips, unsure of what to say to that. Of course he was afraid, but Billy was not the type to easily admit something like that.

"You aren't going to tell us anything, are you?" Billy said.

The voice chuckled, "Maybe the girl would have better luck."

Billy looked again at her, feeling no hesitation in his decision, only hard determination. He couldn't keep the anger from his voice, "No, leave her alone. She's just a kid."

"Wait,"she said beside him. Her voice was strained, a quiet, soft sigh. She stumbled forward to him, "I'll do it."

"You don't gotta," Billy said, tightening his grip on the walkie talkie, "You know that right?"

She nodded, looking him in the eye. Still, Billy hesitated, giving her one last long glance. She looked less sick now, a bit more stable. Her dark eyes were no longer wide with panic.

"What other choice do we have?" she said.

With some reluctance Billy dropped the plastic piece of hardware into her hand.

The voice had been strangely silent throughout their conversation, as though it knew it would interrupt them, and Billy glanced around in the darkness in paranoia. He felt watched.


End file.
